About the Data Centre

The Data Centre at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Australia is a central assembly and management point for much of the Division's vessel-collected (ship) data collected over the past 25+ years, plus related datasets such as those collected via moored instrument arrays (moorings) in the Australasian region - see spatial coverage of Data Centre holdings for an overview of the data currently held. We also administer and maintain a range of data management systems and tools which include a central "Data Warehouse", accessed via a custom Data Trawler application; "MarLIN" (Marine Laboratories Information Network), the Divisional data directory (metadatabase), which contains descriptions of many of the Division's datasets (not just those held by the Data Centre); "CAAB" (Codes for Australian Aquatic Biota), a master species database which provides names and codes for some 25,000 marine species which occur in Australian waters; and the "C-squares" Concise Spatial Query and Representation System, used within data Centre applications and also accessible as a data indexing system and web mapping service to external users.

The Data Centre also curates marine datasets collected by the (former) Franklin and (current) Southern Surveyor National Facility research vessels, which are integrated with our Divisional holdings for the purpose of data description, curation, access, and dissemination. These data streams comprise the underway data suite, and CTD, Hydrology (water chemistry), and ADCP data, as available from National Facility research voyages from 1985 to current, including public access to all National Facility data that is more than 2 years old (younger datasets are available to the relevant Principal Investigators [PIs] only).